Page 14 of What Have You Done?

‘How will they find out?’

‘What if Diana told her mother about it?’ Paula said.

‘She didn’t want her mother to know.’

‘What if she confided in one of her friends?’ She watched his face cloud over.

‘She said she didn’t want anyone to know. I don’t think she told anyone.’ He sighed heavily and considered for a minute, clearly unhappy. ‘But I suppose she might have. All right. I guess I’d better tell them.’ He looked deeply dismayed. ‘But if this gets out – and it probably will – his life will be ruined, and for nothing. There’s no way he killed her, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

Paula left the school feeling uneasy. Kelly seemed certain that there was nothing to Diana’s allegations, but maybe he wasn’t the best judge. And Diana didn’t seem like the kind of girl to make a complaint of that sort – of any sort – that was without foundation. But then, how well did Paula really know Diana? She was her student – bright, friendly, popular. But Paula really had no idea what was going on in Diana’s private life. How would she? She doesn’t even know what’s going on in her own daughter’s private life.

When Kelly had first told Paula about Diana’s complaint, she’d asked Taylor, without naming Turner, if anyone at school, staff or student, ever made her feel uncomfortable. Taylor had avoided her eyes and said, ‘No, Mom,’ in that half embarrassed, half rolling her eyes kind of way. But she’d made her daughter promise that if anything like that happened she would tell her, and it allayed her concerns.

Now Paula arrives home and parks in the driveway. She doesn’t want to think the well-liked gym teacher had anything to do with what happened to Diana.

Taylor’s home already, having walked home with some other girls on the street, at her mother’s insistence when they texted earlier. Paula finds her daughter in the kitchen, cutting up an apple. She doesn’t normally hug Taylor after school, but today she gives her a swift, firm embrace, and her daughter squirms away.

‘Are you okay?’ Paula asks anxiously. She has no idea how her daughter will react to the murder of a girl at her school. Taylor has never faced anything like this before. None of them have.

‘I’m fine,’ Taylor says, taking a bite of apple. ‘I didn’t even know her, Mom.’

Paula is a little taken aback by her daughter’s indifference. Maybe it’s just a defence mechanism, an act. Some of the girls were openly weeping at school today. But it’s true, Taylor didn’t really know Diana; they were years apart. For Paula, a pall of fear seems to have been cast over everything. A girl has been murdered in their small town, and they don’t know who did it. He’s still out there, and it terrifies her. But Taylor seems unaffected.

‘I knew her,’ Paula says. ‘She was in my class. I’ve taught her for years. I know her mother.’ And she can’t help it, she begins to cry, for the first time today, in front of her thirteen-year-old daughter.

‘Oh. I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t think—’

Paula says, ‘Remember, I don’t want you going out alone until they get whoever did this.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

JOE PRIOR GETS in his truck at quitting time and catches his foreman watching him. Joe wonders what the wiry bastard is thinking. Maybe he’s thinking it’s the last time he’ll ever see Joe Prior.

Earlier that afternoon, the foreman had approached Joe from across the dusty construction site with a serious look on his face and showed him something on his phone. It was a photo of Joe, a bit blurry, but it was definitely him. Joe didn’t let on, but he’d seen it all already. He has a phone too. He already knew that the police wanted to talk to him in connection with the girl who’d been found earlier that day in a local farmer’s field. He was just waiting for somebody to say something. Joe looked down at his foreman’s phone and read the story with apparent misgiving. He scrolled further down and saw her picture on the screen too.

Shit.

The picture of him had to be a still from video surveillance from the fucking Home Depot. He looked up at his foreman, who was eyeing him suspiciously. ‘I had nothing to do with this,’ Joe said.

‘Sure,’ the other man said. ‘But maybe you should go talk to them.’

‘Yeah, okay, I’ll go now, if that’s okay.’

‘No, you can go at the end of your shift.’ He added, ‘Maybe give them a call, though, tell them you’re coming.’

His foreman is an asshole. Joe had called the police station and told them he’d be coming in later that day. He noticed the guys at work giving him the side-eye all afternoon.

Now Joe starts his truck and bumps out of the construction site, then turns onto the road into town to the police station. He doesn’t bother to go back to his apartment to change first.

They have a picture of him from Home Depot. They know he was flirting with that girl, obviously. No point in denying it. There’s no law against that. He’ll submit to their questions voluntarily. He doesn’t see that he has a choice – people at work know him; they would have found him soon enough.

He parks in the lot of the police station. He gets out of his truck and walks into the station, still wearing his dirty jeans and a flannel shirt that smells of sweat, and his steel-toed boots, but he doesn’t think they’ll care. He approaches an officer at the front desk, who looks up at him with widened eyes. ‘I understand somebody wants to talk to me,’ he says. She summons another officer, and he’s led into an interview room.

He doesn’t have to wait long. Two detectives enter the room and introduce themselves. Joe studies them both carefully. Detective Stone, a man maybe fifteen years older than Joe, looks sharp enough; the other one is a woman called Godfrey, who looks pretty smart too. But Joe doesn’t think he has much to worry about here. He sits back in his chair, at ease.

‘I understand you’ve been looking for me,’ he says.

‘Yes, we have,’ Stone says. ‘Thank you for coming in.’

---